The un-rounding of the round roti
The inevitable has happened. My full-time help has left, and I have been shoved into the role of cook-cleaner-washer. (This job was called ‘being a housewife’ in one era, but I hear these days it’s politically incorrect to call it like it is.) And it is in the first role – that of the cook – where I end up getting cooked. The bone of contention? The humble chapati.
For the few who have never attempted making a chapati, here’s a quick lowdown: Make the dough. (Never mind the technicalities of getting that right.) Make small roundels of the dough and roll the roundels into a flat, even, round shape. Roast on a flat griddle. Easy? Sure is, except when it comes to rolling the roti into a round shape. Not oval, not oblong, definitely not rectangular, or like a quadrilateral, but ROUND. My mom (or other expert geometricians) are probably rolling their eyes at this: Isn’t it the simplest form for the chapati which starts off as a round ball of dough? The answer is a resounding no.
Defying all rules of shape, the chapati, which indeed does start off as a round ball of dough, takes on myriad shapes on the rolling platform. I start off with this round ball of dough and place it on my rolling platform. Focused on turning it into its famous shape, I gently nudge the dough into a round shape with my rolling pin. And before my very eyes, it magically turns into a neat square, or well-formed oval. The symmetry is perfect, but it isn’t round.
World over, people who have tried making round chapatis will testify to the fact that the chapati does not become round (as it should, guided by its round-shaped dough ball) in the first instance. There is a fair bit of coaxing and prodding with the rolling pin after which it takes on (or should take on) a round shape. So who was the genius who came up with the widely accepted round-shaped chapati? My theory is it was a man with a nagging wife. To keep her occupied (more in the kitchen than with him), he challenged her to make round chapatis if she truly loved him. The wife must’ve bragged to her friends about how she was showing her love in this unique way and flipping a heap of round rotis for the beloved. You know the rest – when women talk, it all goes viral.
And now, the chapati-making world suffers in quiet distress. My mom proposed a solution to end my woes: practice (the one in the cliché, practice makes perfect). But the cliché does not specify if it would be a perfect round, or continue to be a perfect rectangle. So, I hired help with practice – of the round-chapati making, that is. But since she left, life has been all about different shapes.
I have never been the artistic sorts. I can’t draw a straight line even with a ruler. For Biology class in school, I remember we had to draw really complicated cross sections and life systems of organisms. I somehow managed some representations (I use the word loosely here, and hope my Bio teacher isn’t a reader of this blog) of those, but the one thing I didn’t loathe to draw, and even enjoyed drawing, was the amoeba – it required no straight lines; just curvy lines connected in any way possible to create an organism.
How can you expect round rotis from someone like that? I’m a creative, free-flowing, amoeba-drawing cook-cleaner-washer. Creativity is usually a trait much appreciated; however, not so much in the roti-making business where uniformity and standardization seem to be more appealing. And until such a time when I can either change these standards or toss out round chapatis, I have to do that thing in the cliché – practice.
The former is the easier option – changing round roti standards. These days, I announce to H that his lunch box has square chapatis, or chapatis of a shape that hasn’t been named yet. With no option but to eat them, he responds with a smile. Behind the smile, he perhaps dreams of a time when creativity was damned, and geometry was more popular. But that was a time much, much in the past, and since then, they say, life has come to a full circle.
My roti is still to get there.
